WMDE Engineering/Processes

Welcome to the Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Engineering portal. Here you can find information about our engineering work, projects, processes and mentoring program. Everyone is invited to join our projects. The software development & engineering team and many volunteer developers are responsible for the features and projects listed on this portal.

Community-Centered Development

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We develop, use and support Free Software. Our aim is to improve our software with data driven decision making tools and iterative processes. Without our international community of volunteer developers this work would not be possible. We share the responsibility of developing our open source products with the volunteers equally.
The development of our software is driven by a community centred process which calls for corresponding interaction between the communities and the developer team.
Our department is structured using the agile software principles. The main focus is on product development. Everyone in the team is contributing to the product we develop.

The agile principles are:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Technical Wishes

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The 2015 Community Wishlist is a process (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/WMDE_Technical_Wishes_Concept.pdf) to ask to collect user needs of German Speaking Wikimedia Projects.

In October 2015, we invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for what they would like the Team of Community Needs to work on for the purpose of improving or producing curation and moderation tools for active contributors.
We had 1053 Votes, 132 wishes and ~ 230 people which were involved in discussion and election.

UX Design

It is users who are using our software.

Our users are our customers. Instead of money, they invest their time into our products.
Still, software has the potential of creating monetary profit as good and usable software is surely increasing the likelihood of donations.
Users have expectations, wishes and requirements that do not necessarily match the ones of the developers, nor the personal opinion of product management.
Considering the users’ point of view means respecting the users instead being condescending to them.
More rewarding than users just using our software, is users enjoying to use our software.
Functionality is worthless without usability.
Each PM should have an own regular appointment with UX & Design that he/she may use for briefing or to acquire information about the current status of tasks.
PM can drop tasks to UX & Design whenever it is needed.
UX & Design applies the “Kanban” principle (tasks which have been started will be finished before a new tasks gets a higher prio).